


Stargazing

by carryonstarkid



Category: Thunderbirds
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-04
Updated: 2020-03-04
Packaged: 2021-02-28 23:34:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,170
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23015587
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/carryonstarkid/pseuds/carryonstarkid
Summary: Scott and Jane and Kansas, as it was always meant to be
Relationships: Jane Carter/Scott Tracy
Comments: 1
Kudos: 12





	Stargazing

It’s usually a spots car. Something slim and sleek and sexy—something that hums at a hundred and sings a siren’s song. The name is usually foreign and it’s usually sprinkled with silent letters, as if wealth affords him the privilege to neglect half the alphabet. Silver, or gold, or bright, cherry red, with no great regard for speed limits, and even less regard for those left in his dust. Just the wind in his hair, and the sun on his neck, and a smile he can’t shake away. It’s usually a sports car, and it’s usually the time of his life.

Not in Kansas, though. In Kansas, it’s the truck.

And the truck comes with its own name—Ford. American-made, every letter pronounced clearly, certainly, as though each one’s got a purpose. It’s not much, but he knows that. It’s a little rusted at the edges, a slice of 1998 withering away in their present day, but it’s perfect, for nights like these. It’s perfect for driving out to the center of the field, for escaping the clutch of the city, for opening up the bed, laying out the fleece, and spending the night looking up at the Milky Way.

He used to spend all of his summers like this—learned to drive the truck when he was fourteen, took it out into the night and fell asleep beneath the stars. There’s something special about the truck in the night of summertime. Something so completely alone, without feeling lonely. Something so entirely peaceful in a time that had seemed so thoroughly without peace. 

Only a few, in all his years, have ever joined him in the bed of the old Ford, sitting beneath the heavens. He’d had his first kiss here. Soon after, his grandmother had nursed him through his first heartbreak. Once upon a time, he had even trusted John to join him, and Scott still swears that it was in that moment he witnessed John fall in love with the sky.

And now it is a fourth person who joins him—a woman with bourbon on her breath and moonlight in her hair. A woman with perfect aim and an arrow straight through his chest, who pulls and pulls and pulls every last inch of summertime in central Kansas from his heart and ties it right around her little finger. The night leaves a stick on the skin shared between them, leaves them lost somewhere between today and tomorrow, with nothing but now on their minds. Despite the heat, they share a blanket, and everything about the moment feels heavily, lazily warm.

The truck’s doors sit open, the radio playing some old tune his grandfather might have listened to—something warm, and mellow, with just enough guitar to feel like late July. He watches her. Studies her. Wants to remember every little thing about how she looks in this moment, wants to remember every little thing about how this feels. “Scott Tracy,” she says through a layer of sleep that hasn’t yet swallowed her whole. “If you don’t stop staring, I swear I will poke your eyes out.”

“Staring?” he hums, and it’s been so long since either of them have spoken that his words now come out low, and cracked, and mumbled. “Me? I’m not staring.”

It’s a smile, then, as small as it can be. As though she finds him funny, despite trying very hard not to. As though she finds him charming, and does not want him to know it. It’s a minuscule, tiny little tick of the lips, like the first sign of starlight in an evening sky, and Scott finds himself making all kinds of wishes. “You’re a terrible liar.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” he says, tone dripping with innocence he hasn’t earned. “I’m just looking up at the beautiful night sky.”

And she peeks. Only one eye, the other buried in the blankets, the color of a sunset in the mountains—not orange and pink like the island, but rather blue and a little bit of green. She peeks, and Scott turns up his nose, makes good on his word, but finds himself caught off guard by what he sees.

The galaxy is billions of years old. Scott has spent decades looking up at it. It hasn’t changed, and yet he still finds himself struck by true, undiluted amazement each time he sees it. John has more knowledge about the cosmos in his left thumb than Scott has in his entire body. Alan could rattle off constellations until the dawn, but Scott? Scott appreciates the sky in the ways only an idiot can—on a warm summer night, from the back of his truck, all tangled up with a beautifully clever woman.

It’s her turn to stare, now, up at the boy who summer forgot. Her turn to see the stars in his eyes, as he seeks solace from himself. And there’s something in the moment, something in the suspended perfection of that exact second—music playing, drinks flowing, a night beneath the stars with someone so wonderfully, splendidly, _foolishly_ at ease—that begs her closer to him.

And his smile is wider than hers, knowing and certain. He still watches the sky, as though he needs to remember the way it looked in this exact moment. As though he wants to store his wonderment and use it in the future. “Is this the part when I say _it’s beautiful_ , and you say—”

“Yeah,” is her answer. “It is.”

He looks back to her, then. Watches her in the same way he had been watching the sky, except that his smile’s faded now, and the foolishness is gone. The stars are a certainty, but she is everything he doesn’t know—everything he merely hopes—and he studies her not to remember her later, but rather to take her in now. 

And she cracks a laugh—a _giggle_ , even, which is something she suspects she may have forgotten how to do. She giggles, and buries her face back in the blankets, except that then he laughs too, and his arms are already wrapped around her, and she can’t hide. He pulls her in close, leaves a single kiss on her forehead. “I wasn’t aware that we ordered _extra cheese_ , this evening.”

“Oh, stop it,” she says.

“I’ll do no such thing.”

“ _Scott_.”

“Jane Carter,” he says, Shakespearian in tone. Dramatic by nature. “You are my sky, my stars, my summer. I mean that with every part of my being.”

“Gross.”

“Very gross,” he agrees. “And yet, here we are.”

And here they are, indeed, at the center of his grandparents’ farm, wrapped up in old, scratchy plaid and listening to songs their parents once danced to. Crickets sing their songs to the night, long grass waving in the wind as though land and sea have finally met, and the two of them fall asleep in the back of that beaten up Ford, spending their night beneath the stars. 


End file.
